The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is the first novel by the American poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, published in 2021.

Ailey Pearl Garfield is named for the choreographer Alvin Ailey and for her great-grandmother Pearl, and she is raised in a northern city with summers spent in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's people have lived since their ancestors were brought from Africa in bondage. Her grandmother wants her to become a doctor; Ailey wants to be a historian. The novel follows her through school and university while she works backwards through the family's past, including the years when her ancestors were enslaved by a brutal white man named Samuel Pinchard.

The history runs from before the Civil War to the present day, and the narrative is broken up by poetic passages that the author calls love songs, which carry the detail of ancestors of African, Creek and Scottish descent. Ailey's father attends a university in Washington that stands in for Howard, and her sister Lydia's story runs alongside her own.